The bane of all current gamers in the Microsoft family.

It lives in XBox 360 infamy.

No matter how much ice runs in one’s veins. No matter how bold in Halo, how brazen of a playcaller in Madden, everyone fears it.

It lurks silently in the background, lying in wait to pounce on an unsuspecting gamer. The game of your life? You’ve beaten the next to last boss? You haven’t saved?

HA!!!!

It jumps out at you at the worst possible moment, ruining your entire session, rendering that finely tuned state-of-the-art gaming system to a $500 paper weight.

The Red Ring of Death. So prominent and unconquerable that Microsoft had to revise their warranty to cover the entire production run of 360s. It showed at our doorstep about a month ago and toyed with us. It went away.

Last weekend, it came back. For good. XBox support couldn’t help us, so they sent in their UPS ambulance to transport it back to Texas for repair. Perhaps our old friend will return, or perhaps the operation will fail and we’ll be sent a new recruit.

Only time will tell.

When it’s the amount of the country getting to see WVU smash Rutgers on ABC-HD, and one small area is included in the 20%…..North Central West Virginia.

I love living in Morgantown. Despite the presence of a 30,000 student university it still retains a small town feel and getting from one end of town to the other takes about 10 minutes. The crime is relatively low, the education is good, and it’s one of two areas of West Virginia currently expanding rather than dying.

With our small town status comes small town problems, no matter how superficial. One of those is our TV market. There’s no broadcast TV originating from Morgantown – we receive CBS, NBC, and Fox from Clarksburg, as well as CBS, NBC, ABC, and the like from Pittsburgh. Normally that’s not a bad thing. This weekend, it was. The Clarksburg Fox (Fox 46) and the Pittsburgh ABC (WTAE) both carry Big East football Game of the Week feeds. Because our game is on network TV, the GOTW is Pitt-Louisville. I have local channels from cable in addition to DirecTV, but on both groups the sparking ABC HD channel I have is wasted on low def Pitt.

We did wind up getting the game. Clarksburg NBC (WBOY) made up the difference and carried the ABC feed in stunning LD fuzziness, while WTAE threw us a bone and carried the Rutgers game on WTAE weather…a digital broadcast of 24/7 weather. Low def nonetheless. From the dish I stood no chance in hell at getting the WTAE or WBOY bandage broadcasts. This is one of those days where switching to cable internet (and the included local channels) paid off. WBOY comes across the coax, and the digital tuner finds WTAE weather on subchannel 4.2.

I’ve talked with people before about a business to invest in/start in Morgantown….I’m thinking an ABC affiliate.

Haven’t written one of these in awhile….

Honestly, I just haven’t been in a writing mood lately. Seems like there’s a lot going on around me and it’s becoming one big blur. That and the weather has turned dark & dreary this week. Cloudy gray skies, showers & drizzle, mid 50’s – this is the weather I hate. I love the winter when the day goes gray and the sky fills with snow clouds, but make it be rain and it royally sucks. As for this week; mid 50’s are fine, windy is fine, rain is not.  My overall frame of mind is shot right now.  I’m in need of a serious pick-me-up, and I’m not sure where to find it.

The job hasn’t been much fun of late either. We’ve been in our new group for almost two months now, and while Ive found my new teammates to be nice people there’s still a big sense of isolation. The new team doesn’t understand how our stuff works, and while the manager is putting his best effort in there’s still a gap.

It becomes doubly frustrating that my senior partner on the application has five dedicated years on it while I have less than one year split time around 20% (as my HR record reads) and two months dedicated time (much more accurate). SN is real helpful and is trying to give me the room to grow into the app & learn on my own while gently leading me down the trail, but it’s still torturous. I’m used to speaking intelligently and authoritatively on an application, so it’s hard to admit that I’m not an SME on this new app. Not being able to speak authoritatively really hammers my confidence (not that there’s much to break in the first place) and being able to bullshit my way through unfamiliar ground is not my strong point. I know it takes time to gain experience, but it’s making the interim days miserable.  There’s also an ebb & flow to the work that comes in.  A couple weeks ago everything was slow paced to the point of boredom.  This week so many things have been flying at me that it’s become hard to see straight.  These projects will help me grow my experience but there are going to be a lot of stubbed toes along the way.

All this talk is depressing, so let’s find better topics.  Almost two months in and Garrett is still having a blast at school.  He’s always excited to go and his teacher reports that things are going great.  As a result of the emptier house Ethan keeps getting more and more chatty by the day.  Kid-wise, scool couldn’t have started any better.

I’m becoming a total HD snob.  Football games don’t look right on standard def anymore, and I’m much rather see programming in crystal clear wide screen than TBS/TNT Stretch-o-Vision.  DirecTV launched a ton of channels, but not all the content has caught up.  Still, a lot of the Discovery-style network shows look great in the new format.  Cartoon Network, by contrast, looks terrible….probably giving TBS and TNT a run at the bottom of the barrel.

Election Day is still over a year away, but I’m burnt out on the coverage already.  The old Me would be hanging on to every shred of type and loving the all out Internet coverage that didn’t exist back then.  The current Me wishes it would all go away.

Five games to go, and WVU sits #7 in the BCS.  Good placement at this point.  With as crazy as the season is, anything can still happen.  Ending at #3 (or potentially 4th if things break right) guarantees a BCS slot irregardless of the conference standings, and there’s still an outside shot at #2…hell #1.  But we gotta win ‘em all out first.

Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a little less worry & stress…

Thank goodness the summer doldrums are over and the new season of shows is finally here.  Of course nothing is perfect, which is why we have to put up with baseball playoff coverage interfering with Fox shows.  No House next week, dammit!

Speaking of House, the regular staffers are off to a great start this season.  (Note to Al – you may want to stop reading here.) I do wish they’d cut off the new duckling competition…it’s lame and distracting from the rest of the show, which usually flows pretty well.  It’s obvious that most all the old ducks will be back, especially since Foreman is unemployed, so I’d wish they’d pull the string and get things back to normal.

I’ve been a long time Simpson’s fan, but it’s apparent that all the work they did for the movie really took away from the show. The episodes so far this season have really sucked.  Family Guy has had a better season thusfar.

Surely Earl won’t spend the whole season in the slammer.

Best line from my favorite shows in the early season has to be Ted in How I Met Your Mother, telling off two Jersey girls who say they are New Yorkers.  “So why don’t you girls crawl into the open sewer pipe you call the Holland Tunnel and flush yourselves back to ‘pretty much’ New York.  Because I will do a lot to get laid, but I am NOT going to New Jersey!”  Rules of Engagement has picked up where they left off last season and is looking like a quality show.  The same can’t be said for The Big Bang Theory….just not a good filler for CBS.

DirecTv fires off the new HD lineup, and Mythbusters hasn’t released a new show to take advantage of hi-def goodness. Bummer. So far we’re enjoying the rest of the new HD.  I’m enjoying a lot of the History, Discovery, A&E, TLC, etc…the “adult intellectual” channels in sharp, 1080 brightness.  Weather Channel HD is real cris, even without a spotbeam to give us local weather. The Smithsonian HD channel is a nice addition.  After taking it all in I find myself not liking the look of an SD broadcast when the HD is available.  Thumbs down to TBS and TNT for running mostly stretch-o-vision shows in HD.  Not fooling anyone.  Also thumbs down to keeping all the original HD in the 70 tier, and for wasting bandwidth by running three different ESPN and ESPN2 feeds.  Both are simulcast SD and HD on 206 & 209 while maintaining the original HD feed on 72 and 73.  Can the two 70 channels and put the bandwidth to better use.

Every WVU game has been televised so far, and with the pickup of the Mississippi State game it looks like a perfect 12 for 12.  And thanks to the DVR it’s possible to synch up the video with the MSN broadcast using an existing Sirius subscription.  Regular radio is a mile ahead of satellite, while satellite is way ahead of satellite radio.  Therefore, I can pause the DVR to let the Sirius catch up.  The downside is that I can’t flip to other games during commercials.

Or in reality, an Airbus 319.  Still, sitting here in CLT waiting for the boarding in 90 minutes.

It’s hard not to (a) laugh in the face of or (b) call a dumbass the people who bitch and moan about everything that delayed them (90% their own fault) and are still pissed the plane left without them. There are three such people yelling in their cellphones in the two rows around me.  I feel for the people on the other end.  Although they could just stop being enablers and tell the jerks complaining to stop being whiners.

Yes, I know we are trying to keep bad people from doing bad things to planes, but this scanning stuff is getting old.  All we’re doing is being reactive, not proactive.  Hint – the bad guys aren’t going to bring liquid explosives on board because we’re, um, checking for that.  Maybe think outside the box for different ideas….but please use common sense doing it.

I guess I should be happy that I finally got a signal here though.   Too bad I forgot my VPN login token at home.  Darn.    No work e-mails for me tonight.

It’s gonna feel real good to sleep in my own bed tonight.  And it’s gonna feel good to be home with my wife and kids.